


If I Can't Make It Work With You

by VforVitaly



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-11
Updated: 2013-06-11
Packaged: 2017-12-14 15:52:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/838648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VforVitaly/pseuds/VforVitaly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Steve and Liam say their goodbyes, Steve can't help but mope around the B&B and Warehouse, because as amazing as their goodbye may have been, he still thinks Liam was the one, and if he can't be with Liam, he doesn't think he can be with anyone else...and he's not sure he wants to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If I Can't Make It Work With You

**Author's Note:**

> So I wrote this late at night, didn't edit it, so it's probably not great but I had to get it out there!  
> This is set after the events of the Warehouse 13 Season 4, Episode 16 - Runaway.

            “Jinksy, what’s up?” Claudia tilted her head to the side as she sat down beside Steve. No one else was at the breakfast table yet, and Steve didn’t appear to be eating, just toying with a muffin.

            “What?” Steve looked up, clearly caught off guard.

            “Thinking about lover boy?” Claudia chided, elbowing him in the arm, frowning when he pulled away without a smile. “God, you are, aren’t you.” 

            His look told her everything that he needed to know, and the shrug that followed was really just punctuation on the unsaid sentence already hanging in the air between them.

            “I know what it’s like, you know,” Claudia offered, looking at her best friend, even if he wasn’t really making eye contact back. “To have to say goodbye to someone you’re not really ready to say goodbye to.”

            “Todd?” Steve asked, looking at her finally. He had never met the guy, but he had heard about him, and from what he had heard, well, Todd sort of sounded like the one. He just really hoped that Claudia got a chance to be with him again, especially because he really did know how it was, to have the right person, just at the wrong time in your life, because now this was the second time he’d had Liam, but at the wrong time.

            “Yeah.” Claudia nodded, and this time, it was her turn to look away, but Steve understood. It was never easy to say goodbye to someone, especially when some part of you knew that they were the one. “Sometimes there’s just nothing you can do about it, though,” she added. “So eat that muffin, pull yourself together, and come back to work. There’s always stuff to be done, and I find the Warehouse does an amazing job of getting cute boys off the brain.”

            Claudia reached out as she stood up, patting Steve on the back before disappearing to go get work done. As much as she liked breakfast, Claudia hated being away from the Warehouse for too very long. Steve tried to heed her words, he really did, but he found himself staying put, picking at the blueberry muffin, looking down at the table, thinking about how things were, or more how they _weren’t_ and trying to figure out how to move on. Again.

            “Where’d you get the muffin?”

            Steve was jarred from his thoughts once again, this time by Pete, who sat down across from him, eyeing the muffin hungrily.

            “Oh, uh, I bought it,” he stated. “You know, since Abigail isn’t really the breakfast making sort, I thought I’d be prepared.”

            “Oh.” Pete nodded. “You gonna eat it all?”

            “Here.” Steve pushed the entire plate over to Pete without even questioning it, and Pete looked up at him, frowning.

            “The whole thing?” he asked.

            “Mhmm,” Steve muttered, still looking down at the table.

            “You look like you haven’t slept in days,” Pete quipped, spitting crumbs, as his mouth was already stuffed with the muffin. Again, Steve just shrugged, and Pete frowned, letting the whole breakfast thing go for a little bit. “You okay?”

            “Fine.” Steve nodded.

            “Jinks, we’ve been over this,” Pete stated. “Other people may not be able to tell when you’re lying, but you’re really terrible at it, so I can tell you’re not being honest with me.” He didn’t need to be able to get into Steve’s mind to know what was going on, because it was obvious. Maybe some time bad passed, but Pete knew heartbreak just as well as the rest of them. “It’s been three weeks, Steve. I mean, I get that you had a really great goodbye or whatever, but pining like this over a guy who dumped you?”

            “He didn’t dump me,” Steve admitted, looking up, making eye contact with Pete for the first time since he’d sat down.

            “What? But you said-”

            “I lied,” Steve said.

            “But you’re a terrible liar!”

            “You were too busy freaking out over the fact that you were meeting my ex,” he pointed out. “You didn’t notice the lie.”

            “Oh.”

            There was silence, then, while Pete ate the muffin, and Steve just sat there, still trying to sort through stuff.

            “So what happened?” he asked finally.

            “I left. He was lying all the time, and I left.”

            “If he was lying so much, why did you, you know…with him, when you said goodbye?”

            “Because we talked it out, and the lies, you know, it was stupid stuff, like…lying to protect me, not lying to keep things from me. Like telling me that I looked good in jeans that I didn’t, or that, you know, my favorite tea didn’t smell like cat urine.”

            “Oh my god, it totally does,” Pete interjected, though the expression on Steve’s face immediately following the comment told him that it was not the right time. “Sorry, not the point here.”

            “No, it’s really not.”

            “The point is, you’re not over him, are you.”

            “No.”

            “I’m sorry.” When Steve looked at Pete, he could see that the other man genuinely meant it, but he still didn’t know what to say to it. Pete was great, but there were a lot of things that he didn’t understand. There would always be other people for Pete, but for Steve? Well he wasn’t so sure. It was so hard for him to be with someone, because sooner or later, everyone lied, and he couldn’t handle it.

            “I know you are.” Steve nodded. “Look, I’ll be fine, okay?”

            “I know you will be,” Pete said. “I just takes time.”

            “Yeah.” Steve sighed. “Time.”

\------------------------

            FOUR DAYS LATER

\------------------------

            “Steve, can you get the door please?” Abigail called. She was finally trying to work on learning about cooking, seeing as everyone had been giving her grief about the fact that she ran a Bed & Breakfast and didn’t know how to make breakfast.

            “Yeah!” Steve jogged to the door, expected to see Pete, who was always forgetting his key, but instead, he found himself face to face with Liam. “H-Hi…” he gulped, unable to find other words.

            “Hey, Jersey.” Liam leaned against the doorway, all confidence and bravado. “You gonna ask me in?”

            “I…uh, yeah.” Steve had a million questions for him in that moment, but right now, he couldn’t find a single fucking one of them, so he just stood back and let Liam pass across the threshold.

            “Is there a place we can talk?” Liam asked, clearly more together than Steve was – then again, he had intended to come here, and he had had the journey, at least, to think about what he was going to say. Steve was completely caught off guard, completely unprepared.

            “Oh, right, yeah, my room, um…or if you’d rather, we can go to the living room? Less private, but more-”

            “Your room is fine,” Liam interrupted, worried that Steve was going to talk both of them into an early, and very awkward grave, if he kept going the way he was.

            “Okay.” Steve turned, briskly leading the way. He opened the door and ushered Liam inside, instinctively closing it, then self consciously opening it again, because he didn’t want Liam to get the wrong idea. Finally, he settled on leaving the door open just a crack, and moved to sit on the edge of his bed, gesturing for Liam to take the desk chair, if he wanted to.

            “Hi,” Liam said, this time sounding a bit more awkward and out of place, now that they were settled.

            “You already said that,” Steve muttered.

            “Oh, right.”

            “What are you doing here?” Steve asked. “I mean, how did you even find this place? How do you even-”

            “Steve, Steve, one question at a time, okay?” Liam smiled at him, a dry, half smile. Was the nervous, rapid speaking cute? Absolutely, but if he couldn’t get a word in, he couldn’t do what he had come here to do.

            “Okay, um…how did you find this place?” he asked.

            “I got a little help from your friend, Pete,” he admitted. “We kept in touch, you know – that guy has great taste in movies and…” Liam cut himself off. “Never mind, not important.”

            “Okay, well then what are you doing here?” Steve asked, folding his arms across the chest, wrinkling the fabric on his light blue t-shirt.

            “Honest answer?” Liam asked.

            “You didn’t come all this way t lie to me,” Steve pointed out.

            “Fair.” Liam nodded. “I came because something you said stuck with me, and I haven’t been able to get that out of my head.” He paused, looking at Steve, but Steve said nothing, so Liam kept going. “You said in the car, and I don’t even know if you remember saying this, but you said that if you couldn’t make it work with me, you didn’t think you could make it work with anyone, that you’d be alone, and you said you were going to try to make peace with that, and at first I sort of thought that was beautiful, but now I just think it’s depressing, and the more I thought about it, the more I thought about you being alone, and I couldn’t stand that, but the thought of you being with someone else?” Liam looked right into Steve’s gorgeous, pale blue eyes. “I couldn’t stand that, either.”

            “Oh.” Steve nodded.

            “Oh?” Liam looked at him, hurt visible on his face. “Oh? That’s all you have to say?”

            “Yeah.”

            Steve stood up, walked over to the chair, yanked Liam to his feet, and pulled him into a deep kiss. His hands gripped at Liam’s hips, bring their bodies closer together as Liam kissed him back, his arms resting around Steve’s neck, hands moving to run through hair that wasn’t their, before falling gently against Steve’s shoulders.

            “You know,” Liam whispered as he pulled away from the kiss. “That was one hell of a ‘goodbye’ we had last month…just imagine what a ‘hello’ would be like.”

            “We don’t have to imagine it,” Steve growled, pulling Liam to the bed, falling against the mattress, tangled in the other man.

\-----------------------------

            “I missed you,” Liam said softly, pulling Steve’s body towards him, kissing his shoulder as they curled up in bed together afterwards, both somewhere between exhausted, and full of euphoric, electric adrenaline.

            “Say it again.” Steve turned his body so that he was looking Liam right in the eyes.

            “I missed you,” Liam repeated. “I still love you, Jersey, and for what it’s worth, I’m willing to do whatever it is we have to to make this work, even if that means telling the truth 100% of the time, and moving to wherever the fuck, South Dakota, ‘cause a guy like you shouldn’t have to be alone.”

            Steve didn’t say anything at all, he just smiled and leaned in, kissing Liam until they were both too exhausted to stay awake any longer. Everything that Liam had said was true, every last word, down to the smallest detail, and that night, when Steve fell asleep in his arms, a part of him knew that this was how it was going to be for the rest of his life, and he had never felt more comfortable with anything so final.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading, and as always, feedback is appreciated!  
> I want to write more with these two, as well...


End file.
